Ski Patrol (1940) User Reviews (5)

Peculiar mix of right and wrong

[RealLeo · 3/10 · 8 December 2013]

Ski Patrol is a weird Hollywood B-film recently found by a Finnish film enthusiast and shown on Finnish national TV for the first time today (2013-12-08). This hastily made flick tells its own version of the Finnish Winter War just a few months after the fact.

Ski Patrol is a peculiar mix of right and hilariously wrong. It starts in a village in the Finnish Alps (good luck finding that on any map!) where everyone gathers together in the village inn fully dressed in Middle European national costumes to socialize, to smoke long pipes, and to listen to the village band playing the Finnish national traditional instrument, the kantele. As its inhabitants the village naturally has both an Olympic skier and a Nobel peace prize winner.

All of this, including names like Paavo Luuki and Gustaf Nerkuu, is wrong on so many levels. Still, the people are presented in an empathetic way, so I don't know what to think of it.

There is, though, one surprisingly historically correct piece of information in the film. One of the main female characters is a member of the Lotta Svärd voluntary auxiliary paramilitary organization for women. This is probably the earliest feature film in any country mentioning the organization. How could they get that right when everything else is a bit so-and-so? But I digress.

After the introduction, the war starts soon enough with the full-scale attack of the Soviets against Finland and we get to meet a lot of different basic war-type characters - including the obligatory heroic American volunteer. Actually, the number and qualities of different characters is surprisingly large and good for such a short film, so even though the snow fighting scenes are more for effect than for sense, you actually get to understand a little bit of how the different personalities work. For a film that is only four minutes over an hour long, that's not too bad.

At the end of the day, though, the film falls flat because its story isn't compelling enough and the end plot twist is more than a bit cheesy. Still, for a hastily made job (the premiere was just two months after the end of the Winter War), and considering fact checking was perhaps not too high on the makers' priority list (little-known country and no Wikipedia), Ski Patrol is an interesting bit of curiosity - if not for others, perhaps at least for Finns and people interested in Finland. Don't expect anything to match facts, though.

I'll give this film a solid 3 or 4 for effort. More than that would be stretching it, even though I enjoyed watching it with my 9-year old son.

Funny in a way but awful in a many ways more

[anistakokis · 3/10 · 29 December 2013]

Well of course the movie was riddled with inaccuracies, but I felt the whole time the script was written for another movie. The way everything was so "Tirolean", enemy wearing German uniform(German WW1 helmets barely covered with felt to make them look like Russian), I got the feeling that this script was first about some Tiroleans fighting German or Austria in the first world war. After the winter war erupted and a supporting movie was in demand, they just change the script here and there. Maybe the script was even abandoned and got dug up for this.

Although the movie was short and the lines were kinda awful, I hesitate to admit that this actually might have been someones prime effort. Sure there were no Internet at the time, but I think someone had a dictionary in their home, or someone new something about geography. And also Finland got covered quite a lot in United States' media, so this is all in all very weird movie.

Funny movie for Finnish people, everyone else should avoid it.

1939, War. A thing of the past.

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 24 August 2022]

A good use of stock footage is inserted into this B war drama about the invasion of Finland by Russia (before they joined the allies), and the champs of Finland's ski team becoming experts on preventing the Germans from a full attack through their missions on the snowy covered mountains. The film starts off apparently at an Olympics game where reminders of the first World War are inserted with indications that war has ended.

But as time goes by, this is proven to not be true, and it takes brave men (and a few sacrificing heroes) to keep the Russians out. The stock footage and newly shot film for the movie are very different in scope so they do not look like they belong together, but it's a good example of early Hollywood propaganda as the war in Europe began to take attention. One of the soldiers has an issue with having to take another life, but learns quickly the harsh lessons of war. There having been too many movies that dealt with Russia as an ally of Germany so this is unique. The ensemble features mostly unknowns (outside of John Qualen and a few others) so there's no one to really single out, but perhaps that works to the film's benefit.

The Winter War, Hollywood style

[Yrmy · 19 December 2013]

The Winter War of 1939 – 1940, the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland under the banner of security demands and the silent mandate of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, stands as a mythical landmark in Finnish history, the epic national struggle against seemingly insurmountable military odds that resulted in loss of territory but saved the country's independence, a "miracle" born of stubborn perseverance and heart-breaking sacrifice. The war garnered Finland a lot of publicity and sympathy abroad, including this cheap Hollywood cash-in war film that tried, very badly, to champion Finland's cause in its struggle for life against the larger aggressor. The war was two months over by the time the film premiered, and the picture quickly faded into obscurity, as the ever-expanding conflict brought in fresh calamity to compete for attention.

Might be just as well that this was not shown in Finland before the 21st century, because the film's grasp of historical reality is ludicrously thin, and not just in details like when the war began. For one thing, Finland is famously the land of a thousand lakes but few mountains. Yet the Finns here are shown herding sheep in generic Middle European village sets with Alpine backdrops and dancing very jarring dances dressed in studio-standard Tyrolean gear that bears little resemblance to anything that might have been worn in a Finnish village at the time. Even the plot centres on a Finnish unit defending a huge mountain against the Soviet push. This may be because a lot of the combat footage was lifted from elsewhere, particularly from Luis Trenker's First World War epic The Doomed Battalion. Hence we get further historical inaccuracies, such as a Soviet airborne assault – with the paratroopers deploying out of Junkers transports! Skiing was actually an important element in Finnish tactics, allowing the defenders mobility to outmanoeuvre and box in numerically superior but more lumbering Soviet formations that were ill prepared for winter warfare. The film struggles even with its depiction of cross-country skiing in the 1936 Winter Olympics, which opens the film and includes fictional participation by the Soviet Union for plot reasons.

Of course, this is Hollywood entertainment, and you can't expect its makers to treat history as anything more than raw material or not to use the famous artistic licence whenever convenient. But the film buckles on the artistic and entertainment fronts too. We get a cookie-cutter war story with the obligatory romantic strand and a side plot about friendly sports rivals ending up on different sides in the war, all capped with a ridiculous ending. We have a platoon of stock characters (a kill-happy sniper, a reluctant pacifist, a hate-filled avenger etc.) with amusing names, and the actors are mostly going through the motions. The one surprising element is the film's heavy pacifist sentiment, possible because the United States was still just a spectator in the European war (here represented by Arledge's chirpy American volunteer). That tenor would change radically later. However, the pacifism feels quite sanctimonious, when the thrust of the film is to titillate the audience with traditional militarist action. Again, the best action sequences, the downhill racing scenes, seem to have been largely culled from other sources.

It's funny how little both geopolitics and Hollywood formulae have changed since Ski Patrol's days. Now we have even Finnish-born directors in Hollywood milking same kinds of wars and suffering for a bit of similar entertainment with similar methods.

Quick 64 minute programmer on the WINTER WAR

[gordonl56 · 7/10 · 22 May 2015]

SKI PATROL – 1940

This low rent Universal Picture's programmer was rushed into production to take advantage of the recent events during the Winter War between Finland and U.S.S.R. The 1939- 40 war, was over the Soviet attempt to grab large portions of Finland. Finland had been a part of the Russian Empire till 1918 when the Finnish civil war drove out the Reds.

The Soviets had just grabbed up the Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. They now decided Finland would look good as a vassal state. They misjudged the Finns, who fought them to a standstill, inflicting massive losses in men and material on the Soviets. The Reds settled for much less than they wanted. The war made heroes of the Finns to the world.

SKI PATROL is a somewhat fanciful tale, of a small unit of Finns defending a mountain area against a large Soviet force. What Universal did was lift large portions of their 1932 WW1 film, THE DOOMED BATTALION to make SKI PATROL. (I recently viewed DOOMED BATTALION which is about a small group of Austrians defending a mountain top against the attacking Italians.) Universal then filmed some new scenes to fit in around the stock footage.

Two rival skiers who competed in the 1936 Olympics for Finland and the Soviets end up battling each other here. (Same plot device that was featured in DOOMED BATTALION) Of course the producers overlook the fact there are no mountains on the Finnish- U.S.S.R. border.

The Soviets are not amused with the Finnish reluctance to cave, and decide to blow up said Finns, along with the mountain. They tunnel under the Finns and pack the tunnel with high explosives. (Again borrowing from the story from, DOOMED BATTALION) The cast is made up by Edward Norris, Luli Deste, Stanley Fields, Philip Dorn, John Qualen, Abner Biberman, Reed Hadley and Addison Richards.

The director was long time b-film helmsman, Lew Landers. This was one of eight features Lander worked on in 1940.

The director of photography was Milton Krasner. The six time Oscar nominated, and one time Oscar winner worked on films like, THE MAD GHOUL, THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, SCARLET STREET, THE DARK MIRROR, THE SET UP, RAWHIDE, BUS STOP, THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH, BOY ON A DOLPHIN and many others.

While this is not a great war film, if one takes it as the quick 64 minute time-waster it is, it will entertain.